PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The University of Washington School of Medicine serves as the sole medical educational resource for 5 states in the US Northwest: Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. It is also recognized as a major institution in biomedical research; since 1974, UW ranks first amongst American public universities for federal research funding and in the top three amongst all universities (public and private) since 1991 for competing federal science and engineering grants. Within the UW, the Division of Gastroenterology of the Department of Medicine, composed of a core of 45 full-time faculty members, operates from five medical centers: the University of Washington Health Sciences Center, the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System, the Harborview Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In this renewal application for the UW GI Training Grant, we have developed a formal collaboration with Seattle Children?s Hospital to increase the pool of talented candidates, enhance the resources available to trainees, and to expand discovery across the lifetime of patients with gastrointestinal and liver disease. Our diversity allows the research and clinical programs of the GI Division to benefit from complementary strengths, ranging from pediatric to adult patients, from tertiary referral centers to primary care centers in urban or rural settings, and from highly specialized centers to broadly diversified county medical centers. Benefiting from these strengths, the UW GI Division has had a long tradition of training academic fellows, dating to the 1950?s, and the UW GI Training Grant has funded 40 fellows over the past two decades, of whom 30 have successfully achieved and currently thrive in research-focused careers. This application requests two trainees per year who will undergo rigorous research training for two years (4 positions total).